After the Russian penitentiary service announced the death of Alexei Navalny, long the main opponent of President Vladimir Putin, on Friday morning, many people around the world organized funeral vigils and protests against the Russian regime.
Navalny’s collaborators have made it known that they have not yet had the opportunity to have direct confirmation of the death, which they nevertheless consider plausible. Large demonstrations were held in front of Russian embassies in many world capitals, including Rome, Berlin, Paris and Washington. There were also demonstrations in Russia, in particular in Moscow and St. Petersburg, despite the fact that in the afternoon unauthorized gatherings to commemorate Navalny were banned in many cities: the Russian media say that the city authorities began to arrest several people, even though for now there is no precise number.
In Moscow and St. Petersburg, dozens of people went to pay homage to Navalny by placing flowers and candles near the monuments for the victims of political repression during the years of the Soviet Union. In Moscow in particular, many people gathered around the so-called “Solovetsky stone”, a rock taken from the Solovetsky islands, which were part of the Soviet system of gulags, the forced labor camps in which political opponents of the Soviet regime were locked up, including thirties and sixties of the twentieth century.
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